No festivity has quite the vast and varied glitter of a veglione. It takes a whole city to make a party so big and bright. And the last veglione of the season is rather brighter than the rest, as if the spirit of revelry, inexhausted at the end of Carnival, made haste to use itself up in fireworks before the cold dawn of Ash Wednesday.

The opera-house is cleared of its rows of seats, the stage united to the parquet by a sloping floor. Every one of the boxes, rising tier above tier in a jeweled horseshoe, offers the sight of a merry supper-party, with spread table, twinkling candelabra, flowers, gala display.

Crowding floor and stage and lobbies, swarm the maskers. In the center of the great floor the corps de ballet, regiment of sylphs in tulle petticoats and pale-pink tights, performs its characteristic evolutions to the pulsating strains of the opera orchestra. The public dances in the remaining space–dances, promenades, and plays pranks, the special diversion of the evening being to “intrigue” some one. They are heard speaking in high squeaks, in bass rumbles, in any way that may disguise the voice. Many are in costume,–Mephistos, Pierrots, Figaros, Harlequins, but the most are in simple domino.

When a lady wishes to descend among the crowd she, in the darkness at the back of the box, slips a domino over her 208ball-dress, a mask over her features, and goes forth unknown to all save the cavalier on whose arm she leans.

The only uncovered faces belong to gentlemen. These look often a little foolish, a little bored, because the uncovered faces are the natural objects of the maskers’ impertinences, their part the rather barren amusement of trying to divine who it is endeavoring to intrigue, or puzzle, them, and wittily to parry personalities often more pointed than the drawing-room permits.

The party in Aurora’s box was large for the size of the box. She had gone on inviting people, then brought hampers and hampers of good things with which to feed them. There were the Fosses, Charlie with all the Hunt girls, Landini, Lavin, the American doctor, the American dentist, and Gerald.

Also Manlio. The Fosses had brought him. He had returned from furlough some time before. It was known now to everybody that he was the fidanzato of Brenda Foss. There was no talk of his leaving the army; on the contrary, he was rumored to have prospects of early advancement to the grade of captain; wherefore the general public took it for granted that the bride’s parents were providing the indispensable marriage portion.

Aurora’s eyes, at a moment when Manlio’s attention was elsewhere, rested on him with a brooding, shining look. The symptoms of a great happiness, though modestly muffled, were plain in his face. The Beautiful One was coming back in the spring, already near, to marry him.

Aurora’s affectionate look was just tinged with regret. She had suffered a disappointment in connection with Manlio. An obstinate and uncompromising woman beyond 209the ocean, when invited to join in a harmless conspiracy, had preferred to do actually, to the tune of eight thousand dollars, what the grasping creature should have been satisfied with merely appearing to do. The happiness that pierced through Manlio’s calm, like a strong light through pale marble, came to him from the bride elect’s aunt, and Aurora felt robbed.

But Mrs. Foss’s hand found hers under the table and gave it a warm squeeze, whereupon Aurora’s heart swelled in a way it had of doing. When such a dilation took place, something simultaneously happened to her eyes: the surrounding world was revealed to them as “too lovely for anything.” Dimples declared her joy.

“Won’t somebody have something more?” she asked, with the spoon in her hand poised over a bowl still half full of chicken mayonnaise.

But every one was done with eating; all were in haste to go down on to the floor and find amusement, perhaps adventure, amid the fluctuating, fascinating crowd.

The box was fairly deserted when the door opened again, and the eyes of those left in it, turning to see who entered, were met by two unknown maskers.

One wore the costume of a bravo of old times, picturesque, disreputable, an operatic Sparafucile in tattered mantle and ragged plume. The other was in a black satin domino, and had the face of a crow, a great black beak projecting from a black mask.

They stood a little way inside of the door as if waiting to be addressed. There was silence for a moment, while the others waited likewise. Within the eye-holes of their masks the eyes of the intruders glittered in the glassy, baffling way of eyes behind masks.

210Aurora, unused to the mode of procedure at a veglione, asked helplessly in a whisper of Landini:

“What shall I say to them?”

He spoke for her then, in Italian, because he thought it probable that these were Florentines who had come into a strange box for a lark.

“Good evening,” he said. “Will you speak, or sing, and let us know what we can do for your service?”

The bravo, lifting two long hands in loose and torn black gloves, rapidly made signs, like the deaf and dumb.

“You speak too loud,” said Gerald. “We are deafened. Let the lady speak.”

The black domino, with a shrug of the shoulders and a gesture of black-gloved hands excusing the limitations of a bird, answered by a simple caw.

Aurora now found her tongue and her cue:

“And is it yourselves?” she burst in rollickingly. “Proud to meet you! Will you partake?”

With a hospitable sweep of the arm, intelligible to speakers of any language, she made them free of her supper-table, where the candles still twinkled over an appetizing abundance.

Gerald watched sharply, saying to himself: “If they accept, we shall at least see their chins.”

But upon the invitation Sparafucile, with farcical demonstrations of greed, reached forth his long fingers in the flapping gloves, seized cakes, white grapes, mandarins, nuts, and stuffed them into his wide pockets; while the black domino grasped the neck of a bottle of champagne and possessed herself of a glass. A caw of thanks issued from the black beak, and from the bravo, as with their booty the two retreated to the door, there proceeded, as unexpected 211as upsetting, a whoop of rejoicing so loud that those near him fell back as if from the danger of an explosion. In the midst of this consternation the maskers were gone.

“My land! did you hear that?” cried Aurora, who had clapped both hands over the pit of her stomach. “Goodness! he’s scared the liver-pin out of me! Who d’you suppose they were?”

Landini lost not another minute before asking Mrs. Hawthorne if they should go down together for a turn.

Gerald had been on the point of asking the same thing. He had almost uttered the first word when Landini anticipated him. He felt a sharp prick of annoyance with himself for not having been quicker as much as with Landini for having been so quick. A little jealousy was quite in order with regard to Mrs. Hawthorne now, on the simple ground of that more intimate footing of friendship established between them by the portrait. With the expression of courteous mournfulness proper in an outrivaled cavalier, he made the gesture silently of having been at the lady’s service. Manlio did the same.

The singular blonde, with Nubian lip and Parisian hair, Miss Deliverance Jones, or, more commonly, Livvy, who spent this evening at the farther end of the box making her own reflections on the European doings of which she got glimpses, held up a white satin domino for her mistress’s arms. Gerald precipitated himself, took it from the maid and held it in her place. He tried to meet his friend’s glance, hoping for some faintest sign of participation in his regret at not having been “spryer.” For the space of a second, just before she fastened on her mask, he caught her eye. Brief and bright as the illumination of 212summer lightning, a look of fun flashed over her face. She winked at him.

Landini ceremoniously held his arm for her and Gerald saw them leave together with a lessened objection.

Gerald had for some time past suspected that Landini was paying court to Mrs. Hawthorne. Whether the lady were aware of it he could not tell. Gerald had not believed the man had a chance, although, women being incalculable, one can never feel quite easy. But now he could almost have found it in himself to pity the somewhat singular man–Italian in fact, English in manner, Oriental in looks,–if so were he had built up any little practical dream on the fair widow’s acceptance of him. To the possibility of a sentimental dream Gerald did not accord one single thought.

He seated himself, to wait for their return. Only Manlio was left in the box besides himself. Manlio, consecrated to the worship of one afar, cared little to mix with the profane and noisy multitude. As Gerald leaned forth to see the couple that had just left them reappear down-stairs, Manlio, whose eyes followed his, remarked very sincerely, when the large easily-recognized white domino came into sight “È buona!” which can be translated either, “She is kind,” or “She is good.”

Gerald felt the warmth of an increased liking for him, because of the perspicacity he showed. They lighted cigarettes, and together looked over the marvelous scene, so rich in color and life, while they talked of things that bore no relation to it, serious things and manly–politics.

Charlie came in with Francesca, who at the door doffed her domino and mask. Both, heated from dancing, were ready for a rest and a little more of the Champagne-cup.

213“By the way, Gerald,” said Charlie, “that’s a jolly good painting, old chap, you made of our charming hostess.”

“Glad you like it!” answered Gerald carelessly, without irony.

He did not at the moment dislike Charlie.

He was genially inclined to-night toward all the world. While he had been tying on his white cravat before the glass in preparation for the veglione, it had dawned on him, to his surprise and glimmering relief, that he felt something resembling pleasure in the prospect of the confused and promiscuous affair he was enlisted for. He had constated that something like normal responsiveness to the common exterior solicitations to enjoyment was returning to his spirit, his nerves. The tang of life was pleasant to his palate.

A dim gladness moved him, as at coming across a precious thing one had supposed lost, in remembering that he was young....

He laid all this to the mere passage of time, and thanked the gods that unless one dies of one’s hurts one finally recovers.

Under these circumstances it is conceivable that he should not momentarily feel hate or impatience toward any fellow-passenger on the amusing old Ship of the World.

Scraps of poetry stirred in the wells of memory where they are dropped and lost sight of. “I feel peaceful as old age,” he quoted.

But his eye falling on the white carnation which Giovanna, knowing her signorino was going in serata, had provided for his buttonhole, lines less grey came to his lips: “Neque tu choreas....” He fished for the half-forgotten words. “Donec virenti canities abest....”

214Because a positive sense of health pervaded him, he, with a philosophy founded upon observation, remarked that by this sign no doubt he was on the verge of an illness. But he absentmindedly neglected the practices preventive of misfortune, believed in not solely by the popolino of Italy, but recommended to him in boyhood by the excellent physician who after curing his mumps had taught him to make horns with his fingers against calamity of any sort that might threaten.

So, being in a good humor, and made further contented by the uplifting privilege of a broad unmistakable wink from a lady, he did not dislike Charlie as usual; he even, as he looked at him, lustrous-eyed, clear-skinned, smooth, lighting his cigarette at a candle, wondered why one should not like him. He had his good qualities. Mere vitality is one. Those points of conduct that called upon him the disdain of persons more fastidious with regard to their actions, secret or revealed, than he, were not productive, after all, of much harm....

With eyes narrowed, as when he was examining a face to paint it, Gerald watched the handsome fellow in an animated cousinly dispute with Francesca–with the result, really against his hope, of finding himself, instead of aided by his effort of good-will to discover new virtues, confirmed in his previous disesteem. He could make himself almost love Charlie by picturing him afflicted, humiliated, sorrowful. But he could not picture him sorrowful except for narrowly personal misfortunes, such as poverty, sickness. One could not even be sure, with a face of so little generosity or moral consciousness as Charlie’s, that he would under all circumstances be incapable of active malignity....

215The latter thought Gerald had the justice to sweep aside with an unspoken apology.

“Of course, you, Charlie, never could admit that a cousin and a female might know better than you!” Francesca was contending noisily. “It happens that I have lately looked up, with some care, the costumes of the trecento....”

“My dear girl!” interrupted Charlie. “You will be insisting next that an incroyable is a Greek, or that creature, that sort of Italian bandit who gave the disgusting roar, is a French marquis.... Lend me your glass, will you? I think I see some one I know.”

“It’s Trix,” he said after a moment, “making signs to us from the Sartorio’s box. They want us to come over. Come on, let’s go.”

Manlio and Gerald were again left alone in the silent company of the pale coffee-with-milk-colored maid, who unnoticed crept nearer and nearer the front of the box to peep at the brilliant house.

Gerald was beginning to think that Landini kept Mrs. Hawthorne rather longer than was fair when the door opened to let them in, with Estelle and Leslie and Percy and Doctor Baldwin, all laughing together.

“Well, have you intrigued any one?” Gerald asked Aurora.

“Me? Oh, I wouldn’t be up to any such pranks,” she said. “Has any one been intriguing you?”

“I haven’t been down, Mrs. Hawthorne. I have stayed quietly here, hoping to go down with you, if you will be so good, merely intriguing myself meanwhile–” he dropped his voice so as to be heard of her only,–“with wondering what kept you so awfully long.”

“Interesting company, funny sights.”

216“Are you too tired to come down again and give me a dance?”

“Bless your soul, I’m not tired, but I’m going home.”

“Going home?”

“Man, do you know what time it is?”

“I know, of course. But you can’t mean you are going home. You only came at midnight, and it’s less than half-past two. Hosts of people stay until the big chandelier goes out.”

“Ah, don’t try to talk me over! It’s time I sought my downy, if I want to get up in the morning. We’re going to begin Lent like good girls, Estelle and I, by going to church.”

Gerald was certain these excuses were hollow. It was obvious, at the same time, that Mrs. Hawthorne was bent on leaving. He was vexed. He wondered what her real reason was, as men so often do, after women have taken pains to give them in detail their reasons, and tried, ignoring what she said, to get some light from her face.

It looked to him excited in a smothered way. He at once connected this repressed excitement with Landini; but then, the face was mirthful, too, in the same lurking manner, and the proposals of a serious man could hardly affect even the most frivolous quite like a comic valentine.

He finally preferred the simplest interpretation: she had seen as much as she wanted to; she was prosaically sleepy and going home to bed.

“Good night,” she said. “Come soon to see us! Adieu; no, ory-vwaw.”

“Am I not permitted to take you to your carriage?”

After seeing them tucked in their snug coupÉ and hearing this wheel off, Gerald returned to the great hall. He 217without question would remain until the big light was extinguished. Colors, forms, sparkle, golden haze–a painter must be dead or a duffer to leave before the gay glory of it faded and was dispersed in the gray dawn.

The scene viewed from near had its cheapness, its crudity, like those poor painted faces of the dancers pirouetting in the midst of a public they can more surely enchant from the distance of the stage. The costumes, so many of them, came from humble costumers who let them from year to year without renewal of the tinsel or freshening of the ribbons. But those very things gave to this page of life its depth of interest, gave reality to this romance.

The ball was taking a slightly rougher, noisier character as it approached the end. Some of the boxes were darkened, but the floor was full, even after the tired ballerine had been permitted by the management to go home.

Gerald himself now became one of the slightly bored-looking men he had observed earlier, strolling about, claque under arm, in the rigid black and white which took on an effect of austerity amid the blossom-colors of the costumes. He sincerely hoped no one would approach him to intrigue him, and the hope found expression, more than he knew, in his countenance. He felt unable to meet such an adventure in a manner that would satisfy his taste. It marked a fundamental difference between him, at bottom a New-Englander, and his friends of Latin blood, he thought, that he had not the limberness, the laisser-aller, the lack of self-consciousness and stupid shame, which enables them so good-humoredly to take the chance of appearing fools. And so before this romance he was only a reader; they were it–the romance.

He could deplore his own gray rÔle, but not change it; he 218therefore wished anew, every time a merry masker looked as though she might intend accosting him that she would think better of it and leave him in deserved neglect. He had his wish; he was in the whole evening teased by nobody whatever.

His eyes, straying over the crowd, sought for known faces. All Florence had turned out for the occasion, but some of it had by this time gone home. Most of the men he knew had women on their arms, and from their silence or talkativeness one might without undue cynicism determine whether these were their own wives and daughters or wives and daughters of others.

A tall, gray-whiskered old gentleman in uniform passed him–none other than Antonia’s friend, General Costanzi–who was trying to retain all his dignity while beset by two frolicsome little creatures looking like the chorus in “Faust,” who, suspended one on each of his arms, were trying to win from him a promise to take them to supper. He sent toward Gerald a look of comical long-suffering, to which Gerald replied by a nod vaguely congratulatory, and a smile that courteously wished him luck in that lottery.

The painter Castagnola, broad-blown, debonair, passed him, in a costume of sterling and royal magnificence, copied from a portrait of Francis First whom he in feature resembled. At his side, with gold cymbals in her hands, went a figure in floating robes of daffodil gauze, a dancer from one of the frescoes of Pompeii, wearing a mask–four inches of black velvet–only for the form. Her bare shoulders and arms, of an insolent beauty, forbade any mistake as to her identity. Gerald knew, like the rest, that it was Castagnola’s model.

Charlie passed him, at a little distance, with a laughing 219lady hitched to his elbow. Her mask swung from her hand–the ball was wearing to its end, and masks are hot. The hood of her rose-colored domino had been pushed back from a mass of ruffled black hair; her eyes and teeth gleamed with equal brightness and directness of purpose. It was suggested to Gerald by her air and manner that she had forgotten the spectators. Her freedom from constraint was shared by Charlie. Seeing them together reminded Gerald that Charlie was after all Italian,–one forgot it sometimes. He tried to remember which of the bits of scandal tossed on to the dust-heap at the back of his memory was the one fitting this Signora Sartorio.

They passed out of sight, and he forgot them in the interest of the next thing.

Carlo Guerra, like him alone, stopped to chat with him. Guerra, a pleasant figure in Anglo-American as well as Florentine circles, with his fine head of a monk whom circumstances have rendered worldly, had, before inheriting his comfortable income, been a journalist. He still enjoyed above all things the exercise of the critical faculty, and had much to say this evening about a recent exhibition of paintings.

Gerald was hearing it with proper interest when some part of his attention was drawn away by a sound across the house. It was, softened by distance, that species of lion’s roar, incredibly large as issuing from a human throat, and comical from such a disproportion, which had startled the audience several times already that evening. Gerald turned, without much thinking, to look off in the direction whence it came and single out the figure with which it was associated, when he was surprised to find the figure he sought almost under his nose. Not more than six feet 220from him were to be seen the tattered mantle and ragged plume of Sparafucile; likewise the thick crow’s-beak of the black domino.

The two were looking at him and, his impression was, laughing. He fancied they were on the point of speaking to him,–he had thought earlier in the evening when they came into the box that they might be acquaintances,–but the crow suddenly pressed tittering against the bandit, pushing and pulling him away. In a moment they were lost among the crowd.

Who, then, had been accountable for the roar at the other end of the house? An imitator? A double? Gerald suspected a masked-ball device intended to intrigue. He gave it no more thought, but proceeded, started on that line by the episode, to reflect on the singularity, yes, the crassness, of Mrs. Hawthorne’s determination to leave the ball early. The secret of it was, of course, that she had no imagination, no education of the imagination. A veglione was caviar to her. This wonderful scene, beheld for the first time, perhaps the only time in life, and she had had to go to bed just as if they had been in Boston or Charlestown! If one must go to church in such a case, it was Gerald’s opinion, one does not go to bed at all. But she belonged to the class of people who would miss the last act of an opera rather than miss a train or allow the beans to burn. A bread-and-butter person, a sluggish, fat-brained person, elementary, not awakened and sharpened to appreciation and wonder. If he had not been in such a good humor he might have been cross, scornful of her; as it was, he indulgently thought her merely too flatly healthy in every taste for anything but the wilds of Cape Cod to which she sometimes playfully referred.

221He here perceived that he had entirely lost the thread of Guerra’s talk, and that Guerra, probably aware of it, had moved to another subject. It was hearing the name Hawthorne that had startled him to attention.

“I saw you earlier in the evening in a box with Mrs. Hawthorne,” Guerra said, “whom, you remember, I had the pleasure of meeting at Mrs. Grangeon’s.”

After considering a moment with a half-smile, he nodded and pronounced in the tone of an impartial critic, “Simpatica!” Then, after considering another moment, nodded again. “Ha gli occhi di donna buona.” Which means, or nearly, “She has good eyes.” And Gerald’s esteem for Guerra was immensely raised, for while thinking very well of him, he would yet not have expected a man like Guerra to discern so much at a first meeting. A worldling like Guerra might so naturally have said “È bella!” for Aurora that evening in her best frock, had been bella–beautiful; or he might have said, “Begli occhi!” for her shining blue eyes admitted of that description. That Guerra had said what he said indicated finer feeling than Gerald had given him credit for.

Still lingering in desultory talk, the former journalist now asked:

“Have you seen the Grangeon?”

“No,” said Gerald. “Is she here?”

“Yes; she is with the Rostopchine, in a box of the third order.” He looked up and around to find the box with his eyes, and after a moment indicated it to Gerald. “There! Do you see them? The Rostopchine in pale purple, and the Grangeon in an Indian thing all incrusted with green beetle-wings, a thing for a museum. They are talking with a uniform whom I do not know. She was 222speaking of you this evening–Antonia, asking me what you are doing. She has great faith in your talent.”

Gerald’s lip curled a little sourly, and he stood looking upward without reply.

Turning to look down through her jeweled lorgnette and running her eyes over the crowd, Antonia now saw him. Recognition lighted her face to unexpected liveliness. She fluttered her hand to him demonstratively.

After bowing and smiling, he stood quietly, with face upturned, receiving her showered greetings.

He had a certain knowledge of Antonia. She was capable of entirely dropping the remembrance of her bad treatment of him; perhaps forgetting it really, but likelier choosing merely that he should forget it. She permitted herself the caprices of a spoiled beauty.

A classic golden fillet this evening bound her gray locks; a jewel depending from it sparkled upon the deeply lined forehead of a brain-worker. Her irreparably withered neck was clasped by an Indian necklace, showy as a piece of stage jewelry. Light-minded smiles wreathed her heavy face. Where her sleeves stopped there began the soft and serried wrinkles of those long, long buttonless gloves which Sarah Bernhardt had brought into fashion.

It was not difficult to see in what illusion Antonia chose to live to-night. Her readers might even, perhaps, have determined which of her own heroines she personated.

For all these things Gerald liked his old friend the more.

Her lips framed the words, “Come up! Come up!” while her hand made the equivalent signs.

He nodded assent, and with Guerra walking beside him started on his way. Guerra under the central box excused himself and turned back, having already paid his 223respects. Gerald, once out in the lobby, advanced more uncertainly, finally hesitated and stopped.

He was not sure he wished to see Antonia in circumstances which would not allow him to express his resentment of her behavior toward the friend whom with her formal permission he had brought to her house. It was owed to Mrs. Hawthorne not to let the incident pass. He had ceased to be furious at Antonia; he had not written in cold blood the wrathful, finishing letter planned in heat of brain. That, after all, was Antonia as he had always known her and been her friend: Antonia, capable of heroisms and generosities, fineness and insight, density and petulance. One could not drop the great woman into the waste-basket because on one occasion more she had been perverse and the sufferer happened to be oneself. But the great woman, thought Gerald, needed a sober word spoken to her. In conclusion, he would not go to see her, no, until he could have it out with her.

And so instead of seeking Antonia in her box, Gerald cut short his difficulty by going home. It was high time; it had been Lent for hours. If Antonia were intrigata at his failure to appear, it would only be in keeping with the fanciful circumstances of the hour and place.